Automated prepress workflow systems typically perform a variety of prepress operations. Such systems typically process a digital document by performing a variety of operations on the document prior to sending it to a printer. For example, a prepress workflow system may scale, rotate or otherwise manipulate an image that is included in a document, format text into a particular font, size, color, language or orientation, or the like. Exemplary prepress systems include those described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,295,133 to Bloomquist et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 6,378,983 to Ito et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 6,380,951 to Petchenkine et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 6,411,396 to Benson et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,483,524 to Petchenkine et al.
In some cases, automated prepress workflow systems perform operations on page description language (PDL) documents, such as Portable Document Format (PDF) documents and PostScript (PS) documents. Once such prepress operations are performed, soft-proofing (i.e., displaying an exemplary digital rendering of one or more pages of a PDL document on a computer screen, display or other image-based system) can be performed on the documents. In addition, PDL documents can be submitted to a printing device for printing.
Performing prepress operations on large or complex PDL documents can be time-consuming and computationally intensive. Prepress operations could even fail if intermediate and/or final versions of a large PDL document are created because such versions may exhaust system resources during processing.